Rural communities accumulate for Medicaid cuts in the great bill of republicans

Hermann, Mo. – Like many Americans, Cierra Matthews does not have time to pay particular attention to the floods of politics and announcements from Washington, DC, so when the single mother of two boys heard that her benefits of Medicaid could be assigned because the Republicans offer changes in the social security net program, she was shocked.

Congress members, Matthews said, are “covered whatever happens, so that they don’t have to worry about it. So how is it just to remove it from someone who has to worry about it because of finances or because of a job? ”

“I don’t think it’s just that they don’t care enough to think about it and that they live in this happy little bubble,” she said in an interview on Friday.

Matthews lives in a rural community 90 minutes west of Saint-Louis, where she works in the public school system and falls below the poverty line. She is one of the 72 million people in the United States who count on Medicaid for his health care, and before the Missouri voted to extend access to Medicaid in 2020, it was not insured.

She said MEDICAIDE had saved her life: she has been diagnosed with mental health and is under drugs which, according to her sons, have transformed their mother into a different person.

Supplier’s tax repression

As part of an internal policy bill, the Republicans proposed to add work requirements for “valid” adults from 19 to 64 years to exceptions, including those who are under the under 14, such as Matthews.

But GOP legislators have also included provisions in their so-called “a major draft law on the big” to repress health care providers who declare to invoice health care providers to help finance Medicaid, especially in rural areas. Under the new proposal, the federal government would limit reimbursement to the States, certain preservatives invoking “the abuse” of the program by undocumented migrants in the Blue States.

A ceiling or freezing on these costs would cost rural hospitals, such as the Hermann district hospital, billions of dollars in funding, according to service providers, doctors, hospital associations and even republican legislators. They include Senator Josh Hawley, R-Mo., Who argued that the arrangement “would swept” rural hospitals.

Dr. Michael Rothermich, the chief of staff at Hermann Hospital, said that he was already walking on the water with the current funding levels.

“We had to make a lot of difficult choices, a lot of cuts. We had to freeze wages. The saddest for me was that we had to abandon our home health agency,” said a service that has helped rehabilitate people in the distant region, Rothermich told NBC News.

With the steeper cuts proposed by the Republicans, said Rothermich, there is no more room to cut.

“There is no magic money that appears from a place or falls from the sky to help us do our job.

The hospital has only three full -time doctors on the staff to serve patients in two counties, where 1 in 4 depend on Medicaid.

“There are fewer and fewer people to take care of them and less and less resources to try to do what we need to do to take care of people,” said Rothermich.

In southern Missouri, Karen White, administrator of Missouri Highlands Health Care, said that new provisions could mean that they must prioritize patients to be taken care of.

“I think we will see losses of life, perhaps not immediate, but if the chronic conditions are not dealt with for a long time, this leads to a lower quality of life, fewer people working,” said White. “We have lost three hospitals in the past 10 years in our region, which has left Missouri Highlands as the only form of health care.”

The Missouri Highlands is a federal qualified health center, or FQHC – a community health care provider based on federal funding to operate. White said 46% of the population was on Medicaid, and Missouri Highlands is the only health care provider within a radius of three to four hours.

Republicans have a rural hospital fund

To help respond to the gaps that the Republicans create within the framework of their bill to finance the campaign promises of President Donald Trump, the leaders of the Senate work on a separate fund that would go directly to rural hospitals. The head of the majority of the Senate, John Thune, RS.D., told NBC News on Tuesday only in response to “a certain number of concerns that our colleagues had mentioned” about their rural voters, they “make good progress” on a solution.

One of these proposals landed Wednesday with members of the Senate finance committee, the Panel Jurisdiction on Medicaid, to channel $ 15 billion in rural health care providers. But several republican senators, including Hawley, Thom Tillis from Caroline du Nord and Susan Collins of Maine, feared that it was not enough.

“I don’t think that solves the whole problem,” Collins told journalists on Wednesday. “All money is useful, but no, it’s not adequate.”

The American Hospital Association, a group that puts pressure on behalf of the industry, estimates that rural hospitals would lose $ 50 billion in the next decade if the gop repression against providers comes into force. And an analysis of the Urban Institute revealed that hospitals overall could lose more than $ 300 billion following the arrangement.

Tillis circulated a document To his colleagues from the Senate on Monday which illustrates the potential impact on rural health care providers in republican states. Tillis argued that in Carolina du Nord, 600,000 people could lose access to health care due to the changes in Republicans in Medicaid, and he warned the party that he could undergo losses in the mid-term elections of 2026 recalling the defeats of the Democrats in 2014 after a difficult deployment of Obamacare.

Matthews said that because of this question, she partly regrets her vote during the 2024 presidential election, especially given the administration to make the cuts.

“Why can someone else make these choices for you? Why is someone else responsible for (Medicaid)? For you? I don’t think it’s just,” she said.

And White said that she did not understand why the Republicans are committed to the “political suicide” by including the provisions in their element of signature legislation.

“It seems a little strange that people who have been elected (Republicans) will be those who have touched the most with these cuts,” she said.